Arts watch. Rock review.

Loose Mood

Metallica Lives Up To Its Glory Days With A Taut, Slamming Performance

November 21, 1998|By Greg Kot, Tribune rock critic.

Before they became the men in black--the sullen speed-metal kings in Metallica--founding members Lars Ulrich and James Hetfield were record-collectors with a taste for loud-fast-and-nasty obscurities.

On Thursday at the Aragon, Ulrich, Hetfield and band mates Kirk Hammett and Jason Newsted devoted their entire 90-minute performance to the glory of slapping a dusty piece of vinyl on the turntable, cranking the volume to headbanging level and playing air guitar in the bedroom mirror. Thankfully, these guys have great taste in other people's music--their set consisted of thundering underground metal and punk covers primarily from the late '70s and early '80s, and they played them with the passion of disciples on a pilgrimage. Only in this case, musical mecca consisted of songs about all manner of atrocity written by bands with names like Blitzkrieg, Discharge and Holocaust.

Having openers Battery cover Metallica's songbook was a nice gesture to start the evening, but the band was too sloppy to do justice to the headliner's tightly scripted anthems. And though Metallica suggested it too was in a loose mood by welcoming the capacity audience to "our garage," as Hetfield said, the quartet's taut performance was anything but haphazard.

Guitarist Hammett, still recovering from an emergency appendectomy several days ago, planted himself in a chair and his pale skin looked practically translucent. But on Diamond Head's "Am I Evil," he accented every cymbal downstroke by Ulrich with short, sharp guitar riffs. His solos were short, incisive sprints--tinged with Euro-metal harmonics reminiscent of Michael Schenker and early Thin Lizzy. On the road-weary anthem "Turn the Page"--a Bob Seger song that is the oddball masterstroke on Metallica's new all-covers album, "Garage Inc."--he played a spooky intro from the occult-side of Jimmy Page.

There was an undeniable dungeons-and-dragons cheese factor in much of this music--the stuff that gets a rise out of teenagers in search of macabre thrills, but which sounds somewhat silly coming from a band of thirtyish pros.

"Ya'all like Satan, right?" Hetfield said with a leer, by way of introducing a medley of Mercyful Fate tunes with lyrics that proclaim, "I was born in a cemetery."

But whether slamming through the Anti Nowhere League's lunkheaded "So What" or the Misfits' gory "Last Caress"/"Green Hell," Metallica didn't dwell on content. This was about the thrill of fifth gear. This was about paying something back to the overlooked greats--Motorhead and Diamond Head, especially--that made Metallica possible in the first place.

And in the stacatto ignition of Hetfield's rhythm guitar, the quake of Newsted's bass, the whiplash grooves of Ulrich's drums and the liquid lightning of Hammett's solos, the best kind of homage was paid. This was, as Hetfield bellowed on the Motorhead finale, not just a celebration but "overkill."